Sudan: Amid RSF’s massacres, UN’s hunger watchdog declares famine

Amid ongoing massacres by the paramilitary group RSF in Sudan’s El-Fasher, a United Nations (UN)-backed hunger watchdog on Monday declared famine in the city.

The UN-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) declared famine in El-Fasher, a city already littered with piles of bodies and pools of blood so vast they are visible in satellite images .

The IPC also declared famine in another city, Kadugli, in southern Sudan, which has been besieged by an RSF ally.

Late last month, the RSF captured El-Fasher —the final holdout of the Sudanese military in the country’s western region of Darfur— after 18 months of siege. Evidence of systematic mass killings has since continued to emerge, putting the region on the brink of another genocidal campaign .

Before the declaration of famine, around 24 million Sudanese people were considered to be in acute hunger, and 600,000 were said to be facing famine. Previously, the UN described the Sudanese civil war as the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. According to estimates, up to 150,000 people have been killed, hundreds of thousands injured, and 14 million displaced.

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The Sudanese civil war began in 2023 after the collapse of an uneasy power-sharing arrangement between the country’s military, led by General Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF), led by Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, better known as Hemedti.

With El-Fasher’s fall, the RSF effectively took control of the mineral-rich Darfur region, splitting Sudan into two: the paramilitaries and allied militias now control the western and southwestern regions, while the Sudanese military retains control of the east and the capital city, Khartoum.

Food supplies cut off, kitchens bombed

The IPC first declared famine in Sudan in August 2024 at the Zamzam displacement camp, located south of El-Fasher.

During the 18-month siege, food supplies were cut off, forcing people to eat animal feed and, at times, animal hides, Reuters reported residents as saying.

Residents further said that places where people gathered for community kitchen meals were targeted by drone attacks.

As a result, all children arriving in the nearby town of Tawila after fleeing El-Fasher were malnourished, while adults arrived emaciated, MSF project coordinator Sylvain Pennicaud told Reuters.

In addition to El-Fasher and Kadugli, the IPC said the towns of Tawila, Mellit, and Tawisha — where people have been fleeing from El-Fasher — were at risk of famine.

The IPC said food insecurity fell by 6 per cent. However, that still meant 45 per cent of the total population — 21.2 million people — faced acute food shortages.

Previously, the same paramilitaries waged a genocidal campaign in Darfur between 2003 and 2005 and killed around 300,000 people from non-Arab communities of Fur, Masalit, and Zaghawa. The atrocities, at the orders of former Sudanese dictator Omar al-Bashir, involved mass killings, mass rapes, the destruction of entire villages, and scorched-earth tactics.